No one argued that the theme of Burns's novel missed the mark. As a study of a traumatized people, Milkman paints an amazing vision of life during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. We talked a lot about the ways that gossip and suspicion governed the lives of the characters, how rumors were weaponized and how the entire community could turn on someone because of a simple misunderstanding or a slight attack against one's loyalty to the cause. But given this is in a world where people routinely encounter enemies in workplaces, bars and French classes, there's a pathological denial that permeates the novel. The characters can't even accept that the sky isn't literally blue at sunset, because they cannot hazard saying something that directly contradicts common opinion safely. But in a world were the loyalists do actually try to flip renouncers that go to the hospital for treatment, suspicions that someone is a traitor if they go to the hospital at all become reasonable, and all sorts of madness ensues. At the center of this, Burns places a young woman being stalked by a powerful and violent man, and her inability to get help or even people to believe she hasn't had an affair becomes a powerful symbol for the isolation and distrust this simmering civil war created. Those of us that liked the book gushed about the elegance of that combination, and the way that the narrator's indecisive voice (as best depicted as she struggles to explain the crazy things happening to her maybe-boyfriend in a rare phone call, and how a simple phrase from him derails all their trust) embodied the general confusion and hesitance to commit to anything that the entire society reflected. She's an unreliable narrator because no one in the story has the perspective to be reliable when they live in a world where murder by the enemy is normal but a random death is a mystery that needs to be solved, and where you marry someone you don't love just so you won't be as hard if your true love is blown up. However, a third of NUBClub did not agree with this assessment. In particular, the critics found the narrator's voice annoying and laborious to read. For them, it was just pages of aimless repetition to get any action to happen. They did not agree that the connection between the stalking plot and the greater context was elegant; instead, it was too much stuff crammed into one book. Interestingly, all the critics agreed that the core theme of the novel was great. They just wished it was a 100pp novella instead. So overall, we at least agree that Milkman was a smart novel with a strong, true theme. Whether you will like the book or not will depend on how much you like the meandering and affected style of Burns's narrator, and that response will tell you essentially whether you will love the book or wish it ended two-thirds faster.
